beckon eagerly

Whilst wandering along lost in a self critical soliloquy, as your humble narrator has more than just a few regrets and guilty interludes based around the amount of damage caused to those I care about due to my presence in their lives, this conveyance of the local gendarme caught my eye. It bears the familiar color way of the NYPD, however it is the property of the NYC Sheriff, a separate agency with a wholly different mission from the more numerous constables.

The Office of the City Sheriff, Law Enforcement Bureau (LEB) is a state and city charter mandated service of the Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff is an officer of the court, and his primary purpose and function is to serve and execute the various legal processes and mandates issued not only by and for the several courts of the state and its subdivisions, but also for the legal community and the general public.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

The vehicle got me thinking about how vision and memory actually work. My addled brain wanted to file the vehicle away under “cops” upon seeing the thing, due to the familiar pattern of blue and white. Like the adaptation to smell commented upon by employees of the DEP waste water system, wherein constant environmental stimuli renders one blind to odor, how much of our frenetic visual locale is filtered out by an overwhelmed visual cortex? If these NYPD ESU trucks said “USSR”, would you notice it?

The New York City Police Department Emergency Service Unit is the Emergency Service Unit (ESU) for the New York City Police Department. A component of the Special Operations Division of the Patrol Services Bureau, the unit provides specialized support and advanced equipment to other NYPD units. For example, its Canine Unit helps with searches for perpetrators and missing persons. The Emergency Service Unit also functions as a Special Weapons and Tactical Unit (SWAT) and NYPD hostage negotiators assist and secure the safety of hostages. Members of “ESU” are cross trained in multiple disciplines for police and rescue work.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Often one ponders if this is the core thing which sets me apart from others, this allegiance to noticing literally everything. When entering a room, my head pivots about, and a careful inventory of my surroundings are made. I know where the fire exits are in any auditorium, catalog inconsistent details, and above all- instantly notice that which “does not belong”. More often than not, that out of place thing which does belong is myself, of course. Always must I remain an Outsider.

Gestalt psychologists working primarily in the 1930s and 1940s raised many of the research questions that are studied by vision scientists today.

The Gestalt Laws of Organization have guided the study of how people perceive visual components as organized patterns or wholes, instead of many different parts. Gestalt is a German word that partially translates to “configuration or pattern” along with “whole or emergent structure.” According to this theory, there are six main factors that determine how the visual system automatically groups elements into patterns: Proximity, Similarity, Closure, Symmetry, Common Fate (i.e. common motion), and Continuity.